Collateral Damage: Echoes In Our Soul
By Virginia Maksymowicz
Ten Philadelphia artists—all women—tried to put a face on this suffering by "using art to explore the intersection of personal ethics, social responsibility, and complicity with state powered violence." The exhibit, while moderately successful in its goal, ironically suffered from a similar type of information overload.
Upon entering the gallery, Linda Panetta’s photographs provided immediate context. Taken during the past two years, her color images of Afghanistan and Iraq bring those ravaged countries into perspective. These are not documents of land battles or "shock and awe" bombings. Instead, they portray ordinary people in the midst of chaos. A colorful Afghan truck, women in black chadors and sky-blue burkas, and a boy posing with his leg prosthesis share the wall with an actual cluster bomblet. The large number of images (nearly 50) and the salon-style hanging, however, made it hard to see these people as individuals.
Brooding from the back of the exhibition is Lou Ann Merkle’s Mr. Big’s Wounded World, a masterful construction involving a deeply disturbing, carved wood figure with puppet-like, moveable joints, fingers made of real bone, and a missile-like penis. Sitting on his throne, encased in a cage-like cocoon, he loomed above his surroundings. A large, phallic form stands guard at his left. Illuminated entry steps contain reliquary-like assortments of wartime memorabilia. Framed photos of soldiers and civilians ring the upper perimeter, and engraved and painted texts led to the back of the installation.
Unfortunately, the broadness of the issue Merkle tackles—warmongering through the ages—makes it difficult to keep the immediate emotional impact from becoming subsumed by the myriad details. Mr. Big is so repulsive by himself that he doesn’t need his wounded world for illustration: he had already devoured it (as evidenced by his grotesquely distended belly).
A number of the other artists struggled with the same dilemma: how to deal with a large subject on a scale small enough for emotional comprehension.
Marcia Ruth’s combined installation, War Games and Wedding Party, although valiant attempts at synthesizing information, also provide too much of it; the blackened shoes and debris of the latter were strong enough on their own.
Dot French constructs a matrix that enables the many details in her three framed collages to be seen as a whole. In The Emperor’s New Clothes, for example, pictures of butterfly ballots, nuclear bombs, Rumsfeld, and Cheney shared the surface with those of Osama bin Laden, Sadam Hussein, and Adolf Hitler. Her use of cool, geometric patterning and patches of reflective mylar (the shimmering of which turned reality into a mirage) create a sense of tension.
Possibly the most successful piece was an unpretentious 3 1/2 minute videotape by Sharon Mullally, Fadi Flies a Kite. It chronicles the attempt of a 14 year-old Ramallah boy to fly a kite off his apartment building’s roof, something many children do after curfew. Narrated in English and Arabic, it relates Fadi’s desire to "fly over soldiers, tanks and roadblocks." As he struggles to get his kite airborne, maneuvering it between a satellite dish and telephone wires, a Nike logo becomes visible on his gloved hands. Hope, tragedy, and irony come together in this simple image, and put a "face" on the faceless.
The problem of giving form to large social and political issues is not something that plagues only the artists of "Collateral Damage." My criticism in no way means that their effort was not worthwhile. In a political atmosphere where Janet Jackson’s breast garners more attention than presidential primaries, it is heartening to see a group of artists committed to producing an event of this scale. The artworld needs more exhibits like this; artists need a forum where they can develop a visual and political lexicon.
Creating that lexicon involves walking a tightrope between the poetic and the political. It is synecdoche—the form of metaphor that uses a part to represent the whole—that makes Mullaly’s videotape so engaging. "The whole world is a metaphor for something" says Mario, the central character of the film, Il Postino, who apprentices himself to the politically exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. If we can invert Mario’s observation, perhaps "something is a metaphor for the whole world." It becomes the artist’s task to find it.
